All the movie was designed for this strong vertigo feeling with landscapes.
But then, an insane intimacy with character.
The way we shot the movie.
The way I approached depth of field.
The way I approached the rhythm in the editing.
The way we designed the sound and the music.
I was a teenager that deeply loved reading books.
I was reading a lot and I was always looking for new material.
I saw that very beautiful book cover.
about the man with blue eyes.
I am dive into the book and I devoured it.
I was saying to myself, one day I would love to bring this to the screen.
I think that when you adapt, you need that all freedom.
And definitely, the movie is my take on the book.
I really focus on the main character, which is Paul Atreides of course
but still had to make precise choices in order to bring this story to the screen.
And one of them was to focus on the female characters.
And for the people who don't know the story, there's like a female congregation,
the sisterhood of the Bene Gesserit, who are controlling all the politics
from the shadows.
They are masters that have full control over their bodies,
and that can control the minds of other people with their voice.
"- Stop! Cut the rope!"
- I tried to put that up front in this adaptation.
"- Leave us.
- You must do everything the Mother Helen Mohiam tells you.
- You dismiss my mother in her own house.
- Come here. Kneel."
- Here, several things are happening.
The Bene Gesserit can use something called a
voice in order to control the other human's will.
And going into the subconscious and ask him to cross the room
and kneel in front of her.
"- How dare you use the Voice on me?"
- I thought at the beginning that it could look silly,
if Timothy had to cross the room, like a zombie.
And it came into my mind to embrace right away from the beginning,
the point of view of the character,
and to fall into a very short period of time
in some kind of micro coma.
To create that feeling we thought to make very strong dollies camera movement.
In the same time, switching off the lights of the room.
"- Come here. Kneel."
- And also as we are moving the camera, we are not touching the focus.
So it means that the characters are
diving into auto-focus zone.
In order to create that feeling of a disorientation and vertigo.
"- You dismiss my mother in her own house.
- Come here. Kneel."
- When we... the cinematographer of Dune
cinematographer Greg Fraser and I started to brainstorm about the movie
we knew that at the end of the day, it's a character
that will be in contact with a new planet, a new landscape.
And the more he will travel into this landscape,
the more the journey will become introspective.
The idea of massive wide shots that we'll put back a humanity into their place,
into the ecosystem, meaning that they are ends on the surface of a planet.
And I want it to be very close to Paul.
So we are always in the extreme.
Close-ups and the wide shots.
There's not a lot of medium shots in the movie.
- It was a combination of trying to just ride the
edge of creating small figures in big environments
and intimacy.
The large sensor on the Alexa LF allows you to use a mid-lens
yet be reasonably close to your actors.
To me, the proximity of the camera is integral.
So, there are times with Timothee where he's experiencing spice episodes
that we're able to get nice and close to him
to be that intimate.
"- Spice in the tank.
- Somebody help me, please. - Paul…"
- With Denny's films, it gives me a chance to play with something.
And it's very hard to find the word for this,
but I would call it brain-stemi images.
And they're all very sensory, incredibly sensory.
Whether it's a foot on the sand for the first time, or whether it's a hand in water.
Film is rich in these sensory moments.
- What were your choices in terms of what to build?
Because obviously there's a huge visual effects component.
There's all kinds of enhancements to the environment.
And I think beautifully blended.
What were the biggest sets that you built?
- There's two, there's like the palace, the residency.
We built like a massive corridors maybe 30 feet high.
And I wanted to shoot the landing.
So, we built a tarmac in Hungary.
Like the size of two football fields.
To create a scale,
to have the distance with the extras.
To have the proper scope.
- We were doing a sci-fi, but without all of the sci-fi gack.
Like there were no chrome robots walking around.
There's no computers in this world.
It's not how this world works.
So, a lot of the design sort of looks a little bit ancient,
and brutalist and simple.
- The feeling of it is closer to a period movie
morethen to a sci-fi, there's something historical.
And we try to protect that quality in the costume design
and the some elements of the set design.
And definitely in the props too.
It was important for me to keep roots into our reality.
- What am I think one of the most spectacular locations
it is Wadi Rum in Jordan,
which somebody you may know from "Lawrence of Arabia".
It just feels so close to the description of the book.
But the thing is that Jordan has a very special vibe.
It's very impressive of every 25 miles, you have a totally different landscape.
And it's like... there's something about the light here.
There's something about the soul of the country that
I think we can catch here with a camera
that I don't find that same kind of emotion anywhere else.
There's a place where Paul and Jessica meets finally the Fremen.
It's exactly the description.
It's like that kind of horseshoe dead-end in the rocks.
It was like very inspiring for me to find those locations
that felt so close to the spirit of the book.
- And was it a difficult film to edit?
I mean, in terms of getting all of this complexity,
it feels like there must've been significant
challenges in terms of clarity in particular.
- Yeah.
Editing is a very important part of the film-making process for me.
It's a time where you rewrite the movie in some ways.
- With Denny, a lot of the time we will review a scene without any audio at all.
We're trying to kind of make it work like a silent movie.
When you turn the sound off, you become hyper-aware of people's eyes
and I feel like that's a serious part of what we do
is driving the cut by the expression in the eyes.
"Dune" if nothing else is for me, one massive work of rhythm.
It's got an interesting rhythm this film because it starts actually quite gently.
And builds up your interest in the characters
and then it's accelerated.
"- It's getting close, guys. We better abandon the ship now."
- One of the things which were... it was incredibly important for us
was that the strengths, the underlying strength,
the foundation of this movie was the female character.
So the female voice.
The spiritual.
- It's by far my most musical movie.
You know, it's like a never-ending score
because I was feeling that it needed that kind of operatic feeling.
"- Desert power.
- This is only the beginning."
- Well, bring to life,
something that has been so close to your art and soul
and that you dream for 40 years.
Frankly, it brings tears in my eyes
because it's the first time that this part of myself was able to express.
It's like a freedom to finally be honest that I deeply love.
If you were seeing me, someone was coming inside the studio saying,
Okay, that's enough, no more movies for you. You did it.
And that cinema is over.
My first feeling would be gratitude.
Because I would say that was a right.
I feel so blessed that I had the chance to
at least one time in my life went into that zone.
"- Cut."
And technically the problem is that I painted myself in the corner.
I did half of it.
I did half of a big movie.
I did doing part one and I need to do the second part now.
"- So it's done finally."